Yep, on the the road again (hence the smiling face in the picture). This time I will travel from Amsterdam to Singapore, invited by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. The KAS organizes the Asian Conference for Political Communication (https://acpc.asia/speakers/) on the 5th and 6th of September. They invited me to give a presentation or two, and attend a few panels as well. Looking forward to be in Singapore again.

After the conference, I’ll fly to Jakarta, Indonesia, where I’ll spend a few days doing some sightseeing and enjoying the food. Well, after that – yes I know science is a hard job but somebody’s got to do it – I’ll leave for Bali. Do some work in a stimulating environment.

Then, basically two weeks after I left the Netherlands, the main part of my journey to Asia starts. From Bali, I’ll fly to Tokyo, Japan to work at University of Tsukuba. Having written and submitted a proposal to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS http://www.jsps.go.jp/english/) . To my pleasant surprise, the proposal was selected. The JSPS then invited me to conduct research on politics and news on social media.
I’ll be in Japan for five months: mid September 2017 – end February 2018. I might have to buy that winter coat. I am looking forward to collaborate with dr. Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki and to meet the students at her faculty. I also hope to be able to connect with other academics working on social media, political communication and journalism. Japan is no stranger to me :-), having visited it already a few times. So, I’m sure I’ll have a great time.
Keep a watch on my blog (http://blog.mauricevergeer.nl/) for further updates.
That’s it for now, while I wait for my connecting flight in Helsinki to Singapore.

So, last year (2016) my course on social media in political communication and Journalism premiered in the Radboud Summer School. This year (2017), I’m glad to report, I’ll be teaching the course again!
My experiences of last year’s course were very positive, and the students thought so too! It’s an intensive week – entire days of lectures and assignments – and many social activities in the evenings. There will be some tweaks to the course’s design, but the core of the course will remain the same.

In short, the morning sessions focus on theories about social media in political communication and journalism. The afternoon sessions are hands-on sessions on data collection, and data analysis. The afternoon sessions will particularly focus on what you can and can not do with social media data. You will also perform some analyses yourself. The main tool for social media analysis will be R. Why? In short, it’s free, flexible, has special packages for social media data, works on Windows, Apple and Linux computers. There are many more advantages and of course some disadvantages (there’s no perfect software package).

Regarding the afternoon hands-on sessions, we will use several English language social media data sets, available for empirical analysis. These are tweet data, Facebook posts, profile data as well as network data.

DAY 1 (AUGUST 7, 2017)
MORNING

Kick-off meeting of the course

AFTERNOON

Introduction to social media, theory and data

Short presentation of student’s project interests

DAY 2 (AUGUST 8, 2017)
MORNING

Approaches to studying social media data in journalism and political communication

AFTERNOON

The collection of social media data: API’s and software tools

Empirical descriptions and visualization of social media data

Approaches to longitudinal analysis of social media data

DAY 3 (AUGUST 9, 2017)
MORNING

Social media content analysis: theory and methods

Content analysis: political and news issues, sentiment analysis

AFTERNOON

Different approaches to analyzing social media content data

Analyzing social media content

DAY 4 (AUGUST 10, 2017)
MORNING

Social network analysis on social media data

Different approaches to networks on social media: social relations, retweets and texts

AFTERNOON

Analyzing social networks and communication networks on social media

DAY 5 (AUGUST 11, 2017)
MORNING

Advanced approaches to analyzing social media data

Setting the agenda for social media research in journalism and political communication

AFTERNOON

Student presentations

Reflection

Further general information about the Radboud Summer School can be found here. For specific information about my course, please click here. And … maybe we’ll meet in Nijmegen :-).